Journalist and memoirist Adriana Páramo talks about her work as a petroleum engineer and anthropologist, the world of migrant workers, growing up in Colombia, and working with immigrant women in Kuwait. ...more

We moved to Dallas from a small market town in the middle of England. We spent our first Christmas in America driving around our adopted Texan neighborhood, noses pressed against the car windows, looking at the miles of sparkling houses....more

I have so many questions for Cruz. Does she know the whole story about this painting? Did she attend catechism and Mass at Tía Zenaida’s house? Does she know why we took the painting from Las Nieves?...more

Crossing Over, a documentary by director Isabel Castro, follows three transgender women—all of them undocumented Mexican immigrants—as they seek asylum in the US.

“Although this started as a project to raise awareness about the complexities of immigration,” Castro told Buzzfeed, “it has grown into one that is trying to raise awareness about transphobia (both in Latin American cultures and in the United States.)”

Even before there was a war in Ciudad Juárez, I remember that Juárez had the feel of a war zone. It wasn’t until I visited Detroit for the first time that I rediscovered this feeling all over again....more

I can’t afford a $3,000 American tooth implant, but luckily, I’m spending this summer at my Somali aunt and uncle’s house in Yuma, Arizona—a town only ten miles away from Los Algodones, Mexico, where a new tooth costs $1,000.

Our better life started in a small cockroach-infested apartment on the side of a highway in San Antonio, Texas. My mother’s homesickness was unbearable, and we almost went back to Poland. What some may not understand is that this pursuit of a better life breaks you....more

Around the year of our Lord 1984, there were fans of The Birthday Party wandering aimless through the streets. Their post-punk gods vanished. But, just like a dude named Jesus, there would soon come a resurrection, into a different body of sorts.

A bitterly violent war against Mexican Drug Cartels wages on across the U.S. border. Tens of thousands are being murdered, and over a million are being forced to flee their homes. U.S. laws and policy play a major role in the conflict’s violence.

Nature investigates the rising number of terrorism attacks, and threats, against researchers in the field of nanotechnology. Those perpetrating the violence claim to be environmental activists, and believe that nanotechnology will result in further harm to our planet. They are not afraid to make their mission known:

“The next day, an eco-anarchist group calling itself Individuals Tending Towards Savagery (ITS) claimed responsibility for the bombing in a 5,500-word diatribe against nanotechnology that it published online.

With the death toll perpetually on the rise (around 3,000 deaths in 2007 to almost 20,000 in 2010), people are starting to question whether the government’s violent frontal attack on drug cartels is really accomplishing anything.

“My parents, with admirable foresight, had their first child while they were on fellowships in the United States. My mother was in public health, and my father in a library-science program. Having an American baby was, my mother once said, like putting money in the bank.”

“In San Jose, Costa Rica, they took him prisoner, now the whole world knows how the ballad begins of Rafael Caro Quintero.”

These are the some lyrics to an older narcocorrido, a genre of ballad sung about the infamous Mexican drug cartels that have been growing in popularity since the 1970’s, according to an article over at NPR.

William T. Vollmann, the author whose exhaustive research helps to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, and whose books tend to be measured by the pound, has a new book coming out titled Imperial. The 1300-page tome looks at the arid California-Mexico border, and its culture and people, from many angles.

Just one last quote here from First Stop in the New World, and then I promise to stop exhorting you to read the book. This passage concerns an author I hadn’t heard of, Guillermo Fadanelli, “whose novels and stories have been described by critics here as dirty realism.

A.J. Liebling once remarked that the authors of newspaper obituaries are “a frustrated and usually anonymous tribe.” That’s certainly true of Gabriel Collins, narrator of Stacey D’Erasmo’s unusual new novel, The Sky Below.

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